Involution Ocean

She jumped, half unfurling her wings; it was the inborn reflex of any flying creature. Her feet clicked when they touched the deck again. I looked down. She was wearing a whalehide sandal arrangement on each foot; straps crossed her instep and looped around the outside of her heel. Curl­ing upward from the base of the toes on each foot were three stainless steel hooks, six inches long and barbed. Arti­ficial claws.

“You’ve been hunting,” I observed.

“Yes.”

“And you caught this bird.”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to eat it?”

“Eat it?” she repeated blankly. She looked at me in con­fusion. She was adorable. I felt a sudden strong sadistic urge to kiss her.

I restrained myself. “You’re wearing claws,” I said.

“Yes!” she said, almost defiantly. “We all had than, in the old days.” Silence. “Did you know, did I tell you, I was there when your people met mine for the first time?”

I blinked. “A scientific expedition?”

“Yes, they said so.”

“Sponsored by the Academy, no doubt,” I told myself aloud.

“What?”

“Nothing. What happened then?”

“They talked to us,” Dalusa said. She ran one pale fin­gertip along the wing of the bird, slowly. “How beautifully they spoke. From my place in the shadows my heart went out to them. How wise they were. How graceful in the way they walked, always touching the ground. They were so solid and stable. But the elders listened and were angry. They swooped on them from above and tore the humans, ripped them to tatters with their claws. I could do nothing, me, only a child and not kikiye’. I could only love them and cry by myself in the darkness. But even their blood was beautiful, rich and red, like flower petals. Not like this thing’s . . .”

There was a triple rap on the hatch. Calothrick. “Come in,” I shouted, and Calothrick entered, pulling off his mask. He stopped dead when he saw Dalusa.

“You have things to discuss,” she said suddenly. She pulled open the oven, snatched a pair of insulated potholders off two hooks on the side of a cupboard, and pulled out a covered dish. “I will go eat with the sailors.”

“No, stay,” I said. She stopped for a second, then glanced at me with such an intensity of emotion that I was taken aback. “We will talk later tonight.” She picked up her mask from the table, a china white mask with a single blood red teardrop from the corner of the right eye. She started up the stairs; Calothrick, coming down, gave her a wide berth. She left; the hatch snapped shut.

“Weird,” opined Calothrick, shaking his head. Wisps of tangled blond hair fell over his eyes. He brushed them aside with one hand. IBs fingernails were dirty. “Say . . . you’re not carrying on with that um—' he searched for a noun and couldn’t find it “—with her, are you?”

“Yes and no,” I said. “I might if there were any point to it. But there isn’t.”

“With that?” said Calothrick incredulously. He seemed more shrill than usual. I looked at him closely. Sure enough, the whites of his eyes were tinged slightly yellow with Flare withdrawal. He was suffering. “What about Millicent?”

“Yes, of course, there’s always her,” I lied smooth!”

After the way she betrayed me I wouldn’t have touched her with an electric prod. “But after all, what is love but an emotional obsession ...”

“Caused by sexual deprivation, yeah, I know that one,** Calothrick said. “But that bat-woman gives me the creeps. She looks all right, but it’s all surgery, y’know? I mean, if it weren’t for the scalpel she’d have big ears and claws and fangs. She has her own tent, y’know. The men say she sleeps upside down. Hangs by her toes from the ridgepole.”

I was annoyed. “Mmm,” I said. I changed the subject. “What do you think of the behavior of those sharks?”

“Sharks? I dunno. Murphig was talking to me about diem just a while back. He spends a lot of his time watch­ing things, just sort of looking at them. He says they can smell death at a distance. Maybe, he says, smell it before it happens. The kid’s as nuts as Desperandum. Yeah, and. speaking of Murphig . . . how’s the stuff coming?” . I swung open a cabinet door and took out a metal bottle. In the bottom was a thin scum of syncophine. “Terrific,” said Calothrick, sniffing the bottle. He pulled his plastic packet out of his shirt and poured in a thin rivulet of the brew. “Ugh. It’s black,” he commented, sealing the bag. “First thing tomorrow, then, Murphig gets it.”

“Not too much,” I said. “It could be extremely powerful stuff.”

“Yeah, yeah, right, IH be careful,” Calothrick said impa­tiently. “Oh, by the way, d’you see that plankton out there tonight? Quite a sight.” He strapped his mask back on, slipped the Flare inside his shirt and went up through the hatch.

I sat down on the kitchen stool and began to clean out the still, meticulously. Sooner or later I would have to brew some spirits with it, if only to divert any possible suspicions of Dalusa’s. I wondered about my attraction to the woman. There were mixed motives, I decided.

Not least of which were the amplified joys to be derived from her company. It may seem strange to you, reader, but put yourself in my place. Did your mistress, lover, compan­ion, ever lean forward to breathe hotly on your neck? Do ypu remember the quasi-erotic shiver it sent down your spine? Then Imagine • like stimulus from Dalusa, whose body temperature exceeded that of a human being. Re­member the contagious excitement received when your partner’s heartbeat grows more rapid? Dalusa’s was almost twice that of a normal woman. If the idea of woman as an object of mystery appeals to you, well, Dalusa’s alien origin gave her a permanent romantic shroud. And she was beau­tiful. What matter if her classic loveliness was the gift of surgery? Surely you agree that it is the soul inside that we love, rather than the mere exterior. You agree with it, whether you believe it or not.

That was the major facet of the attraction. But there was a strong subliminal one, that Dalusa had perhaps deliber­ately fostered.

All of us have sadomasochistic qualities. Mine, though well controlled, seemed strong. I had admitted to myself long ago that my use of drugs was killing me. The Whole concept had become only another part of my self- image. But cruelty to oneself is the first and most crucial step in crudity to others.

I thought it all out and it all bored me. I decided to go on deck and see the plankton Calothrick had mentioned. I put on my dustmask.

As I stepped up through the hatch, the last sunbeams slipped upward off the eastern lip of the Nullaqua Crater. It was night.

Yet there were stars, and a dim green glow arose from the sea around us. I walked to the rail and saw that all around the Lunglance were square miles of krill, burning with bioluminescence. It was magnificent Suddenly I smiled inside my mask. I was glad I had done the things that had brought me to this spot I was glad to be alive, since I needed life to see this.

As I leaned over the rail a dark, winged shape flitted quickly before me and a narrow, dark swath opened in the closely packed crystals. A glowing bundle of them moved outward and upward with a swallow’s grace, then, sud­denly, was directly over me. Green coals cascaded around me, falling like nuggets of lava from a cool volcano, scat­tering and pattering across the deck.

The hair on the back of my neck was stirred by the wind from her wings as Dalusa settled beside me. A weblike black net was still strapped to one of her ankles.

She had brought me jewels in the seagull’s severed foot.

Chapter 6 The Storm